


Overwrite

by Laurasauras



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Metafiction, The Homestuck Epilogues, Toxic Masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 01:57:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20368762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurasauras/pseuds/Laurasauras
Summary: Dirk isn't okay with some of his past being part of a story. And as the story is his, he doesn't have to be okay with it.





	Overwrite

**Author's Note:**

> This is _not_ going to work for mobile users how I'd like it to. I'd recommend only viewing if you can on desktop, and please excuse me if the strikeouts are not covering the correct words depending on screen size, I got it as close as I could. I can write up a [strike]example[/strike] version if people are greatly inconvenienced by this, just shoot me a comment to let me know. :)

DIRK: This isn't working.

Dirk Strider is sitting at his desk, hair like a majestic bird, purple pantaloons perfectly pressed, and yet despite all appearances, the universe won't yield completely for him.

ROSEBOT: If you told me what you were trying to do, perhaps, as your strategist, I could help. 

Dirk ignores Rosebot. He does that a lot, despite his insistence that he couldn't do this without her. Rosebot finds herself supremely grateful that in at least one of her many lives, she practiced daily meditation. It doesn't quite cure her of her many frustrations, but it doesn't hurt. Today she is meditating on the soothing sound of a sword striking flesh and cracking the bone beneath. A broadsword, not a katana. An important distinction.

DIRK: (Should've brought Roxy.)  
ROSEBOT: No, that would have been disastrous.   
DIRK: I wasn't talking to you. 

Rosebot has, in several lifetimes, seen her brother decapitate a person as easy as she breathed. Physically easy, anyway. Dave got his grace from the Lalonde side of their genetic swamp. And his conscience.

(It’s a little bit satisfying, thinking thoughts. Because one cannot help their thoughts. It’s not the fault of a thinker for thinking, and should an eavesdropper not want to hear what a thinker thinks of him, he should probably not delve into a thinker’s head.)

DIRK: Aren't you going to ask me why?  
ROSEBOT: Not really my area.   
ROSEBOT: You could try asking me why. That would be interesting.  
DIRK: I want her blood.   
ROSEBOT: That wouldn't work.   
DIRK: You don't know that.   
ROSEBOT: I'm afraid that is my area. 

Dirk is silent for almost four consecutive seconds. Rosebot wonders if her interface includes Spider Solitaire. Surely they have a few decks of cards on this ship. Yahtzee, maybe.

DIRK: Where's Terezi?  
ROSEBOT: Yes, because what this needs is a courtroom roleplay.   
ROSEBOT: Just tell me what you're doing.   
DIRK: Can't you see?  
ROSEBOT: Unfortunately, in order for me to see a path to success, the person involved must have a chance at success for me to see.   
ROSEBOT: Currently, you're failing so hard at your objective that the chances of your success are so tiny, yo mama might miss them with her superior robot eyes and step on them accidentally.   
DIRK: I will do literally anything to stop you from making yo mama jokes.   
ROSEBOT: I know. 

Dirk taps his pen against the desk. He’s been trying to temper his natural impulse to monologue about his plans. It’s ironic, sure, but he’d rather not have such an obvious and exploitable weakness.

DIRK: There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to rewrite the past.

Whatever Rosebot had been expecting, it wasn’t that.

ROSEBOT: I can think of several.  
DIRK: I’m not creating a paradox. I just want to  
DIRK: Beef up my origin story.  
ROSEBOT: By creating a paradox.  
DIRK: Look, no, I know what I’m doing.   
ROSEBOT: And the universe exhales a heavy sigh of relief.  
ROSEBOT: All was well under the mastery of Dirk Strider, Who Knew What He Was Doing. 

Dirk grits his teeth. Rosebot feels that portion of herself, which is no longer useful now she has once again proven that she is indeed able to annoy Dirk, slide to the back of her mind. A softer version rises to the foreground.

ROSEBOT: If you alter your backstory, you may not arrive at this place.  
ROSEBOT: And as your life has touched so many, the ripple effects could be monstrous.   
ROSEBOT: The universe already dislikes the shaping that you do of the present.  
ROSEBOT: We could write events into the future, but that would be begging for the universe to fill in the blanks in ways we could not control, and the thought makes me uncomfortable.  
ROSEBOT: Whatever your narrative faults, you don’t leave blank swaths for Skaia to inhabit.  
ROSEBOT: But even that pales to the consequences of overwriting the past.

Dirk tugs on his hair. He glares at the book. Then he starts to cross out words. Rosebot stands up, alarmed.

Dirk sat on the floor of his kitchen, head in his hands, shoulders shaking as he tried furiously to keep his sobs silent. Jake must have sensed

it anyway, because he was there before Dirk could compose himself, crouching down and looking at him with concern. 

ROSEBOT: It’s in past tense. It’s not supposed to be in past tense.   
DIRK: It’s not going to be in any tense, it’s worthless.

JAKE: Im no stranger to a kick in the oculars from our allium friends but this seems a mite overboard my love.  
JAKE: Whats wrong?

Dirk pressed the heels to his eyes and his breath shudders. He couldn’t stop crying. 

DIRK: Go away.  
DIRK: Please.  
JAKE: Dirk its just me.  
JAKE: I know you pride yourself on being a downright massive hard-man but to be honest this is a relief.  
JAKE: One moment of weakness in exchange for all the times ive been …  
DIRK: No.

ROSEBOT: Why are you crossing this out?  
DIRK: It’s irrelevant.  
ROSEBOT: It’s in the book.  
DIRK: It’s untrue.

Rosebot considers taking Dirk’s pen. This feels wrong. It itches some sense of hers that is keyed into the journey they’ve been on.

JAKE: Dirk …  
DIRK: Can’t you see how cruel this is?  
DIRK: How cruel this world is?  
DIRK: What use is this moment, this humiliation to the universe?

Dirk took his hands away from his eyes and looked at Jake. Jake, who now felt comfortable enough with him to bear witness to him like this,

eyes red and crying over fucking _onions._

DIRK: What point could this possibly have?  
DIRK: We won.  
DIRK: And I don’t want to be a spectacle.

Jake put his hand cautiously on Dirk’s leg.

JAKE: Its just us.

Dirk shrugged Jake’s hand off and stood up, starting to pace the kitchen.

DIRK: No, it’s not.   
DIRK: Maybe I could handle making a fool of myself if it was just you.  
DIRK: Maybe I could learn to handle that.  
DIRK: But it’s not just us, it’s the readers.   
DIRK: What do they get out of this?

Rosebot touches Dirk’s shoulder. He flinches, and not just because of the massive strength potential she carries around in her metallic form. They don’t really "do" contact. It’s one of the many things the two of them have in common; they’d rather show their affection by existing in the same space, no need to acknowledge each others’ presence.

The fact that she’s breaking that unspoken contract makes Dirk just as uncomfortable as the fact that he’s being touched. He’s gotten worse at that since he ascended. At being touched. He has enough _thinking_ happening without having to overload sensory processing that he didn’t choose to initiate.

ROSEBOT: Stop crossing it out. Just leave it for a second.   
ROSEBOT: Talk me through it.

Dirk sighs and pushes back from the desk, rubbing the sides of his nose where his shades pinch in. Rosebot has known many Striders, and they all share that gesture. One doesn’t get the Strider without the total unwillingness to be seen. And luckily for them, they also come with Lalondes, who are uncannily good at seeing them.

DIRK: If it were essential, I wouldn’t be able to do that.  
DIRK: If it were anything important, I wouldn’t—  
DIRK: You know what, it doesn’t matter, none of it matters.

Dirk stopped and turned to look at Jake. Really look at him. He felt like he’d never looked at him before in his life. Like to do so would be like staring at the sun.

Dirk stared at Jake and wondered what it was about him that had made him so impossible to quit. What drew him to Jake in the first place? Was it simply that they were the only two guys and he had a preference? Was it to add tension to their already dysfunctional foursome?

And why, if theirs was to be one of the most romantic storylines of the whole damn plot, did they have so many problems? Could it not have been simple? With everything that the game threw at them, why were they not allowed just that one small refuge of peace? Maybe they have that now, but the game was over and Dirk knew that his life and arc was not in his own hands.

It was obvious, now. His love for Jake was just as written as everything else was. And so was Jake’s for him. He didn’t doubt it, not anymore, not from that point on. He’d figured it out. No matter what he did, Jake would still love him, because he was just a fucking _character,_ and he’d always been too stupid to take control the way Dirk could.

He needed to break free.

It was clear to him now, that if he didn’t do something soon, the only point of entertainment would be his life with Jake. And he _couldn’t_ share that.

ROSEBOT: Some of that looked important.  
DIRK: It wasn’t. Isn’t.  
ROSEBOT: “Essential” doesn’t mean “comfortable”.  
DIRK: I wrote you joining me without robbing you of your feelings.  
DIRK: I just reshuffled your prioritisation.

Rosebot wants to make a disbelieving noise, but she’s a robot with no need to inhale or exhale, and no ability to vocalise non-word sounds. If Dirk was to use a particularly catchy portmanteaux, Rosebot wouldn’t be able to mimic the usage until he updated her dictionary.

She can’t express disbelief, because she’s a fucking robot. Though, in fairness to the ridiculous thing Dirk just said, she does still _feel_ disbelieving. 

ROSEBOT: It seems you are experiencing human emotions now.

Dirk glares at her, and she supposes she earned that.

ROSEBOT: I mean that you aren’t robbed of them. You’re feeling right now.  
DIRK: Am I?  
DIRK: Is having a feeling about a feeling really feeling something?  
DIRK: Say I killed you …  
ROSEBOT: Interesting beginning to a thought experiment.  
DIRK: And I stand at your grave …  
ROSEBOT: The detail is either flattering or disturbing, I’ll robo-compute which it is, but it will take a few moments.  
DIRK: And I want to be sad that I’ve killed you, but I’m not.  
ROSEBOT: Robo-computing, robo-computing …  
DIRK: I think to myself, “A normal person would be sad right now”.  
ROSEBOT: Surely not.  
DIRK: And _that_ makes me sad. Because I would like to be a normal person with emotions.  
DIRK: That doesn’t count as being sad about your death, that’s me being a narcissistic asshole.  
ROSEBOT: Perish the thought.  
DIRK: Hal used to say “robo-calculating”.  
ROSEBOT: Now now, blossom-butt. I’m my own sentient being trapped in robotics and will express my sarcasm in my own way.

Dirk’s jaw twitches in the way it does when Rosebot has found a particularly heinous pet name for him. If she gave him the option of choosing between her ceasing the yo mama jokes or the pet names, he honestly doesn’t know how he’d make that choice. 

DIRK: What I’m _saying_—  
ROSEBOT: Yes, and you’re very good at using your words.  
ROSEBOT: I understand what you’re saying.  
DIRK: And?  
ROSEBOT: And wanting to miss Jake or missing being in love with him are both feelings that would not occur to someone who was, get this, _not thinking about Jake._

Dirk pushes his chair back from his desk and starts to pace. There’s Roses inside Rosebot who have been actual mothers to other Dirks and who have instincts to stop their child before he strains his hip on those turns. But none of their children are this Dirk. This one is _agonisingly_ the alpha Dirk. 

It would be somewhat reassuring, on one level or another, if this Dirk had started to move with laconic grace, wore his hats on his head rather his shirt, and addressed Rosebot in a Southern drawl, “lil lady”. That path would have a clear solution. Paths with a dizzying amount of steps aren’t so intimidating to a seer of light, though.

ROSEBOT: An alarming number of Dirks have literally been hospitalised for pulling muscles doing what you’re doing.  
ROSEBOT: I think I find that commonality across universes funny.  
ROSEBOT: Would you make the human laughing noises for me?  
DIRK: Fuck off.

He stops pacing and crouches on his toes, hands in his hair. 

ROSEBOT: Mind the tiara.

He holds his middle finger up and out. When he rethreads his fingers into his hair they’re in a slightly different position. Rosebot would smile if she could. Well, she can, but she looks like Kermit the fucking Frog. 

ROSEBOT: Do I need to fetch Terezi after all?  
DIRK: You could read my mind too, if you wanted.  
ROSEBOT: I find it crass.  
ROSEBOT: And honestly, do you think I want to read your internal monologue?

Dirk snorts and uncurls himself like an armadillo, falling gently on his ass and letting his legs stretch out.

DIRK: Why did I have to fall in love with him?  
DIRK: Why did I have to fall _out_ of love with him?  
ROSEBOT: Which offends you more?

Dirk takes a moment, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the ceiling. Rosebot can respect someone choosing their words. 

DIRK: It feels pointless.  
DIRK: And I’m so crowded with my own narcissism, it isn’t even hurting me now.   
ROSEBOT: Except in the way that you’re standing over the grave of your departed relationship self-flagellating.   
DIRK: Not taking up a lot, in the scheme of things.  
DIRK: I think I’m bored.  
DIRK: Maybe I want that to be the plot.  
ROSEBOT: Self-actualisation in the form of _Eat Pray Love?_ I considered it.  
DIRK: Derivative?  
ROSEBOT: Not your story, either.  
ROSEBOT: I’d read it if Jake was healing and moving on.  
ROSEBOT: But I don’t think we live in that kind of universe.

Dirk’s voice is quiet when he replies.

DIRK: No. I don’t think we do either.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a Theatre of Coolty reference in here, go check out that if you haven't had the pleasure. [Fic.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3275858) [Film.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIavjRkRKT0)
> 
> Humongous thanks to OxfordRoulette, ClasspectAnon and Cade for putting up with me pulling my hair out trying to make the strikethrough work.


End file.
